Win, Fail, Pause for the Blues & A Voice You Should Hear in Second Life

It’s been a busy couple of days – busy in the sense that housework is busy and about as annoying at times. :) I’ve been fighting the sense for weeks that being in SL is like driving a car with the emergency brake on. I just felt like I had to find the one button to push and things would magically improve.

I spent a lot of time on Friday and Saturday tweaking and tuning without much success. Then I spent some time just analyzing what happened and when and decided a lot of it must have to do with my video card – which is a perfectly good card but it seemed like something to at least try. So I decided to do a clean install of the driver.

I uninstalled my video driver and then cleaned the registry and rebooted. Then I checked and uninstalled the previous version of the driver which was now operational. After cleaning the registry I rebooted and then wound up rinsing and repeating for 90 minutes until I finally got rid of them all.

The good new is that once I had installed the most recent driver again, this time without the extras I don’t need, my fps had tripled. Whew! I tweaked a few more system things and did some maintenance and, although it’s still not where I’d like it, my inworld experience is much less exasperating.

In between bouts of techie impersonations I dropped in on some of the multitude of halloween parties and, in one case, a 4 year anniversary that friends seemed to think I should attend. Lots of fun in spite of the fact that I’m not a big fan of the whole thing. :) I tried to get in the mood and wear “costumes” which in my case means either going as a pink skinned “normal” or wearing one of my more outlandish avatars.

At one point I was a mermaid and missed the window to get to a friend’s party because the sim was full. Few things look as weird as a large fish swimming over the desert floor. It was a pity because those who love the Barbie shape would have enjoyed her and her undulating butt.

Every now and then I soothed my irritated soul by ducking out to a blues concert. Arriving a little early for one I happened to catch the end of a set by Alex Mays. Alex is a relative newcomer (5 months old) and I was so intrigued I made sure to catch him again yesterday. He plays great blues guitar and mostly his own original music but also does covers.

This guy is making a name for himself fast and it’s well deserved. His calendar doesn’t show all the dates I know he’s playing yet so join his group – Alex Mays {Live Music} – that way you won’t miss an opportunity to enjoy his performances.

And, just in keeping with the music I’ve been using to keep myself semi coherent for the past few days, here (after a brief introduction) is something “loud and nasty”.